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FCIC Commissioner Byron Georgiou
Join us for a special FDL Book Salon tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. ET when FDL’s Ed Walker will host a live chat with Financial Crisis Inquiry Commissioner Byron Georgiou. They’ll be discussing the FCIC’s financial crisis report and take your questions on the same.
From Mr. Georgiou’s biography at FCIC’s website:
Byron Georgiou has had a long career in the private and public sector in business, law and government service.
He currently oversees Georgiou Enterprises, with wide ranging interests including the manufacture of a broad range of lithium ion iron phosphate all electric powered vehicles. [...]
Mr. Georgiou has served since 2005 on the advisory board of the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance which hosts the world’s leading blog on corporate governance and financial regulation.
Since 2000, Mr. Georgiou has been affiliated Of Counsel to the national law firm of Robbins, Geller, Rudman & Dowd, the world’s largest plaintiffs’ securities practice, and has spent much of the last decade investigating and civilly prosecuting financial fraud, with leadership roles in the historic litigations on behalf of victimized investors at Enron, WorldCom, Dynegy, AOLTimeWarner, and UnitedHealth.
Mr. Georgiou serves on the FCIC along with Phil Angelides (chairman), Bill Thomas (vice chairman), Brooksley Born, Bob Graham, Keith Hennessey, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Heather Murren, John W. Thompson, and Peter J. Wallison.
You can read a copy of the FCIC’s published conclusions at this link (pdf).
Add this event to your calendar and join us for what should be an enlightening discussion — 2:00 p.m. tomorrow ET at FDLBookSalon.com.
17 Comments
Thanks Rayne.
Will he answer Qs about criminal prosecution refs, or beg off becuz they are confidential until filed by don’t-hold-yer-breath-Holder?
Really… Inquiring Minds DO Want To Know..
Just who Da bad guys are/were and what Laws did they break?? And are the FEDS going to doing anything about those criminal offenses that brought down the American Economy???
Is there anything else worth asking? Don’t we know just about everything else, if not in the detail they might (or might not) have collected.
IOW, what are the consequences, if any, of the ‘report.’ Dust-bin of history, or something more.
Mr. Georgiou won’t find any David Gregory nerfballs here. He will probably have trouble fielding the many Q’s. Especially the pointed ones. They’re in the tubes already.
What is HIS reason for visiting us?
Good q!
Via Krugman , the crazies now want to investigate the investigators, and not because they weren’t investigatory enough.
LOL. Gotta hand it to the Rs. Never missed an opportunity. OTOH, Ds never took advantage of one, well, that is before they figured out where the $$$$ are.
Well, where else would you go if you were the FCIC?
There aren’t many blogs with the kind of powerhouse we have at this site in terms of knowledge and experience.
Ask your questions during the salon tomorrow.
Can’t be any worse than a certain guest author who pointedly avoided answering questions from FDL contributors… ;-)
I like Mr. Georgiou’s biography, interesting background that seems well-suited to the FCIC’s mission. I’m hoping that given this background he’ll anticipate our most pressing questions.
This is a major score for the Lake…! ;-)
Perhaps he will explain why they still protect Greenspan. Or why they hide the change in regulatory approach under George W.
Or why they feel a need to spread blame that belongs at only a couple of doorsteps – regulators under Bush, GOP under Newt and Phil Gramm stopping regulation, Greenspan spreading the Ayn Rand nonsense, Wall Street rating folks not employing the mathematical talent to tell them that geographic diversification does not turn bad loans into good loans, Wall Street for removing the actuaries that kept it honest from being in charge and replacing them with math degrees that had no business background, and then the hiring of marketing kids with degrees in art history because they came from the right social strata to give them the ability to sell “shit” to under informed “1940″ sophisticated buyers appointed to some towns pension board.
Indeed the real report has been written in blog posts and research by many, so is his report a summary, or a version of “if you pollute, dilute”?
Then we can discuss the gambling with taxpayer funds that the TBTF Banks got into with derivatives – taking billion dollar bets against each other for pretend “adjustment to risk taking in a given asset category” reasons.
I look forward to the discussion – but I doubt I will comment further.
He looks like a nice Greek kid – I hope he makes his pouli or papou (or papau if the old fellow can’t type many years ago late at night) proud.
Phil Angelides is the fellow that looks like a nice Greek kid – no offense intended to Byron Georgiou
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/01/fcic-report-misses-central-issue-why-was-there-demand-for-bad-mortgage-loans.html
I hope everyone bookmarks that Naked Capitalism post since it answers the who what why and how of the biggest part of the biggest financial con job in history.
It is the single basic question – who profited the most from knowingly encouraging/buying/securitizing bad mortgage bonds with the sole intent of betting against them with highly leveraged credit default swaps? Even better, swaps of synthetic CDOs. Know one lays it out more understandably than Yves Smith in that post.
Can’t bet against bad mortgages unless you have bad mortgages in the first place.
I made an analogy the other day that it’s like the MOTU buying milk futures knowing up front that the milk was laced with melamine and being allowed to place side bets on how many infants and children would die. But it’s even worse. Its selling the melamine to the milk producers in the first place and making a profit even with that first step and telling the milk producers, “don’t worry about the melamine, we’ve already lined up buyers who WANT tainted milk.”
The milk producers all say, “This is really weird that the futures buyers are telling us to go ahead and lace the milk with melamine, and don’t worry about the consequences, just focus on how much money you’re making for flooding the marketplace with bad milk that can’t be distinguished from good milk since it all gets mixed together at the bottlers.” But they go ahead and do it.
And that is why people need to go to jail. These MOTU did the most reprehensible things imaginable to the unprotected public, both the recipients of the obviously unsustainable mortgages and the innocents who bought the bonds based on phony ratings and without knowing that in every swap there had to be a “mark” or a counterparty for the vultures to feast on.
Who could have imagined? Lots of people but they were waved off by the so-called regulators and financial “geniuses” like Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, Dimon, Geithner, Bernanke, and countless others who still sit enshrined in their thrones, laughing at the ruin they created and marvelling at the stupidity of the general population.
How they must howl with hilarity every time they see posted in some comments section of the newspaper “It’s the Community Re-Investment Act, Barney Frank, and Fannie and Freddie, morons, they did this!!!”
“No one” not know one. Can’t believe I typed that!
Spot on-
Few look at the actual charts and note how well the Community Re-investment Act held up, how well regulations of Fannie and Freddie kept them out of trouble prior to 2007, and how Barnie Frank never even defended any of the bad practices – he just said don’t toss Freddie and Fannie just because the CEO had been caught with his hand in the till (“accounting irregularities”).
It was 2001 before the serious gambling began, 2003 before regulators stopped regulating, 2000 before geography became the cure that made bad loans good for rating agencies. Tranching and securitization were and are solid ways to get capital into housing while filling pension and other investor needs, but Greenspan is incompetent as a professional and he allowed the complexity to be used as a cover for fraud. Again, the one profession that had a tough and enforced code of ethics, and led in the development of securitization – the actuaries – were at the end – no where to be seen in management of these areas of finance. Tilly (an actuary that was in this at the beginning and became a principal) retired at Morgan – and indeed his name is not even mentioned in these “histories” of the securitization world, nor is he called to testify to commissions like this one